According to the “anxiety industry” – what I like to call modern media – the neurotransmitter dopamine in the human brain is the root of many social problems.
In fact, it’s now becoming increasingly common to blame dopamine for all kinds of repetitive behavior problems.
for example:
- viral video by inside quest Author and marketing consultant Simon Sinek blames dopamine for causing addiction to technology such as smartphones and social media.
- a group called dopamine project promotes “better living through dopamine awareness” and claims that “the expectation of dopamine release in the brain keeps addicts lying, cheating, stealing, and craving the next fix.” are doing.
- Forbes article They claim that dopamine was the ultimate cause of America’s “addiction” to guns.
- anti-porn activist They claim that dopamine acts as an “erotoxin” (erotic toxin) and is released when people watch porn, causing neurological damage in the viewer.
- Porn has been called “Playboy on (dopamine-releasing) steroids,” injecting dopamine into your brain every time you click into an online world of “dopamine-releasing naked women.”
- this fun article We call dopamine the “celebrity” neurotransmitter, the Kim Kardashian of neurochemicals.
Those who play with the unrecognized and unsubstantiated concept of behavioral/process addiction commonly claim that dopamine is the root of many of the world’s problems, and that people develop a drug-like tolerance to dopamine. They say they learn it and continually want more of it.
Oh, what a glorious problem-free society we would have if we didn’t have to deal with the dopamine curse.
Or do you?
Remember the scene in the movie The Awakening, starring Robert De Niro, where patients are put into prolonged catatonia? This doctor, modeled after real-life neurologist Oliver Sacks, is L- A drug called dopa is administered to temporarily restore life and consciousness to these people.
L-dopa is a chemical that becomes dopamine in the body. Without dopamine, our bodies and brains cannot function. We would all become catatonic.
Dopamine is not a “reward” chemical. That’s not how our bodies actually use it.
First, like everything in our bodies, dopamine serves many purposes.
- It acts as a vasodilator and dilates blood vessels in the body.
- Loss of dopamine causes the state of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative neuromuscular disorder.
- Most antipsychotics work by blocking the function of dopamine, but this is not because dopamine “rewards” cause hallucinations, but because the brains of people with schizophrenia are overly sensitive to dopamine’s effects. This is because it may have become.
- Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be partly due to reduced dopamine activity, which means parts of the brain are not working well enough to inhibit attention and resist impulses. Is not …
Dopamine performs many complex functions in the brain, and only kindergarten-level neuroscience can describe it as an addictive drug.
Dopamine is associated with rewarding experiences, but not because it makes you feel good.
Recently on Twitter, a man said that porn is [him] After a few days of abstinence, there was a distinct dopamine rush. I replied that this was interesting. And he must be completely unique and superhuman to be able to detect and differentiate the experience of different neurochemicals in his brain.
Pleasant experiences, whether it’s sex or sports, involve a variety of neurochemicals and hormones released within our bodies, all of which have complex, interactive effects.
When a person is about to experience pleasure, dopamine is released in the part of the brain that experiences and processes pleasure.
Dopamine’s role here is not to make you feel good. it’s not. Feelings of pleasure, pleasure, and euphoria arise from opioids in the brain, neurochemicals that increase pleasure and suppress pain.
Dopamine’s role in pleasure and reward is to help the brain recognize the “saliency of motivation.”
This means that dopamine acts like a little warning signal to your brain, saying, “Hey, this is it!” be careful! This already feels good, so I want to remember it so I can do it again. ”
An important issue to note here is that a lack of dopamine doesn’t necessarily make the experience feel worse.
When dopamine was suppressed in a study using laboratory rats, even though dopamine was suppressed, the rats showed a “normal hedonic response pattern.” In other words, they still had normal hedonic responses.
In another rat studyThis is an experiment with heroin that showed that dopamine transmission increased in anticipation of heroin administration, but rapidly decreased once the drug was administered (by the rats themselves). Remarkably, this effect did not occur the first time the rats self-administered heroin, because they had not yet learned that heroin really feels good.
Dopamine helps us learn that rewards feel good, and allows us to receive them again.
This applies to riding a roller coaster, having sex, masturbating, kissing your lover, watching your favorite sports team win, and even holding a young child.
When a reward is uncertain, dopamine may increase in anticipation of the reward. So, what is certain is that there may be less anticipatory release of dopamine than gambling.
I don’t know why, but perhaps it’s because you learn more from gambling than you do from certainty. What is certain provides little new information.
So why is it important for the media to get hooked on dopamine? Could this simply be due to a lack of media sophistication and mass psychology misunderstanding the nuances?
Here’s the big problem: When people like Simon Sinek, whose video went viral blaming dopamine for millennials’ problems in and out of the workplace, bring up neuroscience, they are using subtle strategies to manipulate us. This means that
Sinek is not a neuroscientist and has never studied the intricacies of this aspect of the human brain.
Watch below as he expertly weaves a fairy tale about the dangers of dopamine and the millennials it preys on.
But he knows something you don’t. Mentioning neuroscience is a great way to convince people you know more about something and make your argument sound more convincing.
This effect was recently demonstrated By researchers at the University of PennsylvaniaHe showed that the use of unrelated references to neuroscience is an effective way to lead people into believing that complex phenomena are simple and easily explained by the brain.
(You might trust this article more just because it explains the brain!)
People’s problems are never simple.
When people do the same thing over and over again, there are so many complex reasons behind that behavior, even if that behavior is causing problems.
If you give a reductive, simplistic answer like “it’s because of dopamine,” you will distract from the person. People learn, and dopamine is just one of many factors involved in a person’s learning.
When we encourage people who watch too much porn, use their cell phones while driving, or look at Facebook every two minutes to blame their problems on dopamine, we are telling them that their It teaches us to externalize our problems and blame them on dopamine.
If we could bring the focus back to the learning and salient aspects of these processes, we could bring people’s attention back to their own actions, their own motivations, and the meanings they (and their particular religious or social backgrounds) gave them. It will help you get back to. for this action or experience.
It helps put people back in the driver’s seat of their lives.
So instead of talking about unrelated neurochemicals, start talking about humans.
Dr. David Ray He works as a clinical psychologist in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
This article was originally published at: psychology today. Reprinted with permission from the author.